Cable, satellite and terrestrial networks are three major mediums to deliver digital broadcasting services to end customers. Unlike satellite and terrestrial transmission, cable channels do not exhibit significant time and frequency selectivity. Consequently, spectrally efficient modulations (i.e., 256-QAM and 1024-QAM), are employed in cable networks to meet the capacity demand of bandwidth-consuming services such as HDTV and VoD, and to boost the penetration of digital video broadcasting. Recently, low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes have been introduced in DVB-S2 and DVB-T2 standards because of their design flexibility, decoding simplicity and the universally excellent error correction performance over various channel types.
LDPC codes are a class of Forward Error Correction (FEC) block codes, often used in transmission environments to protect audio and/or video data. These Forward Error Correction codes increase the possibility of receivers recovering from and correcting errors in a received multimedia stream, without the need to retransmit data that is received with errors. The FEC error control system requires the transmitter add redundant data to a data stream. The maximum fraction of errors that can be corrected by the FEC is determined by the way the error correction code is calculated. Examples of FEC are block codes such as LDPC codes, that work on fixed-sized blocks, packets of bits, or symbols of a predetermined size, and convolutional codes that work on bit or symbol streams of arbitrary length. Many types of block error correction codes exist, among which are Reed-Solomon or, as already mentioned, the LDPC (Low-Density Parity Check). Other types of error correction codes have been developed for specific use in transmission of digital video streams over IP networks, such as SMPTE 2022 (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers), which unlike other typical FEC schemes such as Reed-Solomon, relies on very simple algorithms, and is useful in environments where limited resources are available, such as a Set Top Box receiver for Digital Television.
The Forward Error Correction codes are calculated during transmission time, so as to protect the multimedia stream as it is transmitted over a network, including any supplementary data added for the transmission. However, calculating error correction codes is demanding in terms of calculation resources. Therefore, in practice, error correction codes are generated for multimedia data to be transmitted in a broadcast-like manner, that is, when the same multimedia data can serve many receivers simultaneously. Examples of broadcast networks besides cable networks are TV/radio satellite or terrestrial broadcasting or IP multicast over wired or wireless transport media.
As a result of LDPC codes, frameworks such as, for example, density evolution, differential evolution and extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) charts, have been invoked to design and analyze the degree profile of a code ensemble. In terms of the threshold Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) for decoding convergence, codes constructed following these frameworks can approach the Shannon limit closely, assuming the block length is infinite, the code structure is random and the number of decoding iterations is unbounded. However, from the perspective of practical implementation, the random structure usually leads to prohibitive encoding/decoding complexity and memory requirements. For this reason, structured LDPC codes that can achieve a better tradeoff between power efficiency and implementation simplicity have become a more appealing option for system designers. For instance, the error control codes adopted by ETSI Second Generation Digital Video Broadcasting Standard for Satellite Channels (DVB-S2), IEEE 802.11n and IEEE 802.16 standards all belong to the category of structured LDPC codes.
On the other hand, the DVB-S2 LDPC codes family, which were originally designed for forward error control in satellite communications, have also been used by DVB-T2 (Second Generation DVB Standard for Terrestrial Channels), and are strongly recommended for DVB-C2 (Second Generation DVB Standard for Cable Channels). In addition to the consideration for system compatibility, the main reason behind the use of DVB-S2 codes can be attributed to their universal superior performance under various channel conditions. However, to meet the demand by cable operators for higher spectral efficiency and flexible throughputs, a technical challenge for using the DVB-S2 codes in DVB-C2 lies in the mapping of the given codes to constellations of very high order, which range from 256-QAM to 4096-QAM.
The DVB-C2 project has attempted to use the contents of the DVB-T2 Standard as much as possible. OFDM modulation will be adopted as well as the coding technique (BCH+LDPC) specified in DVB-T2 Standard. However, DVB-T2 Standard is designed for use in the terrestrial wireless channel while the DVB-C2 Standard is designed for use in the cable channel. A cable channel differs from a terrestrial channel in that a cable channel is a high quality (high SNR) channel with only a few weak echoes. Also, cable television operators have fewer spectrum restrictions than terrestrial broadcasters. Therefore, the signal frame structure and preambles used in DVB-T2 may not be suitable to be reused in DVB-C2 Standard.
A frame header of Forward Error Correction (FEC) is designed for use in the DVB-C2 Standard. In the DVB-C2 Standard, Adaptive Coding and Modulation (ACM) or Variable Coding and Modulation (VCM) is applied to each FEC block to provide as much flexibility as possible. The FEC block is composed of a Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem (BCH) outer code and a Low-Density-Parity-Check (LDPC) inner code. Two dimensional interleaving is also performed. Interleaving is a procedure for rearranging the order of a sequence to fulfill different objectives. For channels subject to selective fading over time and frequency domains, bit and/or symbol interleaving have been used in conjunction with channel coding to distribute the error bursts. In addition, bit interleaving is employed by concatenated codes, particularly Turbo codes, to scramble the information bits to the second constituent encoder so that a long random code can be generated. A frame header is attached in front of each FEC frame to indicate the coding rate, modulation type and physical layer pipe identifier. Besides the signaling of physical layer related information, the FEC frame header has to provide a structure so that it can be easily and reliably detected in the receiver.